The Epstein Vortex Is Devouring Donald Trump
The septuagenarian president has arrogantly believed he was above any consequences. Unfortunately, hiring incompetent sycophants all around has exposed him to something he can't escape.
A couple of months ago, it seemed as if Donald Trump were rampaging through American government, its constitution, and its politics. Despite his growing unpopularity, and the stubborn inflation he made worse with his ill-considered tariffs, there seemed to be nobody able to stop him.
Then the Ghost of Pedophiles Past came for a visit, in the form of a simple House Resolution entered by libertarian Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).
The resolution called for the Department of Justice to follow up on the campaign promises made by Donald Trump and his surrogates, such as now-FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, and now-Attorney General Pam Bondi, to release the full files that the DOJ and FBI had on Jeffrey Epstein. This meant all of the gathered evidence, emails, photos, etc. Let everyone know how deep his global ring of sex trafficking of teenage girls went. In February, Bondi called in a bunch of MAGA influencers and media types, gave them binders that looked official, and then filled them with nothing but information already made public in years past. Once these people realized it, they were steamed and publicly said they’d been had. This laid the foundation for everything to come.
This should’ve been an easy one. Donald Trump claimed repeatedly he’d cut Epstein loose long before his 2019 arrest and…untimely death in the Manhattan Correctional Center. He claimed he’d done nothing wrong. Virginia Giuffre, the most prominent victim of Epstein, who doggedly pursued justice against him and his girlfriend/partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell, had said she had not witnessed Trump committing any crimes or molesting any of the teenage girls being trafficked. It seemed like he was covered, and his claims that prominent Democrats would suffer greatly if he released them would, if true, cement his stranglehold on American politics.
It didn’t happen, though. Trump and Bondi refused the request. Massie, in a fit of high dudgeon, tried to submit the bill to the floor to make it binding upon DOJ. Speaker Mike Johnson, who looks like the sort of man that has behaved inappropriately with teenagers behind closed doors, refused to let the bill come to the floor of the House. A determined Massie then went office to office, gathering signatures to reach the majority of 218, which would force a vote on his bill. Johnson, determined to avoid holding the vote, sent the House into recess for weeks. When Adelita Grijalva won the special election for her late father’s congressional seat, one of the items in her campaign was a promise to be the 218th signature for the discharge petition to get Massie’s bill, now co-sponsored with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), its vote on the floor.
Johnson proceeded to dig in further, refusing to swear in Grijalva while also pretending like she wasn’t doing her job, even though she legally could not do her job because he refused to swear her in (it would seem that some constitutional amendments are needed on this score—more on this at another date). The government shutdown then happened, and Johnson continued to leave the House out of session, an extremely odd maneuver that has never taken place during a government shutdown. It became very clear that the Speaker was bound and determined to make sure those files did not become public.
Why?
The likely answer here is that during this interim period from the House going into recess until now, the attorneys for the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, who are still unwinding his business deals, paying settlements to victims, and scouring his electronic records six years later, have been more publicly occupied. They turned over the entirety of 18,000 emails from Epstein’s Yahoo email account (jeeproject@yahoo.com) to Bloomberg Magazine, which has been busily combing through them for information. In response to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, Epstein’s Gmail accounts and other documents (he weirdly kept spreadsheets with the real estate holdings of all of his neighbors, Trump included) were turned over to them.
And this week, it all came crashing in. Grijalva was sworn in and signed the petition immediately. The White House, in a panic, tried to strongarm Marjorie Taylor Greene, the living avatar of MAGA id, to remove her signature. She refused so strongly that her and Trump have now broken, with her claiming that he’s forgotten what MAGA means. Bondi and Patel then arranged a meeting with Lauren Boebert, another MAGA diehard with more zeal than brains, and proceeded to drag her into the White House Situation Room, where she couldn’t bring her phone and record anything. Reports are (almost certainly based on what Boebert told aides/friends afterwards) that she was alternately cajoled and threatened for an hour, but refused to budge. Nancy Mace, who has awkwardly made sexual assault a cornerstone of her campaign for South Carolina governor after spectacularly firebombing her congressional career by going through staffers like a dog through a box of Milk Bones, has also not yielded.
Simultaneously, the Democrats on the Oversight Committee performed one of the most spectacular bait jobs ever, a stunning feat for a party that usually ties its own shoelaces together. They released three Epstein emails from the subpoena response, which all reference Trump in some way. Republicans retaliated by saying, we’re not going to let you cherry-pick, here’s all the emails! Over 20,000 of them, and when Zeteo News organized them, they found that over one thousand emails between Epstein and others revolved around Trump, including emails where Epstein told associates that he was at Trump Tower after the election, and was at Mar-A-Lago for Thanksgiving in 2017. More damning, Epstein was regularly meeting with Steve Bannon, who helped steer the MAGA ship, and also with Vitali Churkin, the shadowy figure attached to Moscow’s influence operations—which included the 2016 election interference. Epstein would later relay information about how to negotiate best with Trump to Moscow via a third-party ambassador in the emails released as well. Finally, and amongst the most curious entries, when Epstein was discussing the reopened investigations into him, he replied to a friend thusly:
Compromising material is hinted at in many of the emails Epstein writes, and by the time one finishes reading, it becomes very easy to believe that Jeffrey Epstein did not commit suicide. That feeling only grew reading this.
If this all feels like it should have been preventable for Trump, well, it was. In his first term, he had competent people working for him. For instance, a ruthless attorney general in Bill Barr. Barr was a veteran of the Reagan and first Bush era of Washington. He knew how to perform the dirty tricks. He knew how to cover up the real nasty shit. He was incredibly skilled at it —consider how he made the Mueller investigation become irrelevant and then made Epstein’s death disappear quickly from media coverage, all with no damage to Trump’s approval ratings. I guarantee that when Barr decided to dump Trump over the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, he knew that Trump wouldn’t come after him too hard, because Barr made the biggest threat to his presidency and his freedom disappear. Yes, that last sentence means what you think it means.
Trump’s biggest weakness is that this entire term is about revenge and greed and sycophancy. He does not have anyone capable working for him. He has fired every single capable person in the upper echelons of government and replaced them with cretins. Therefore, every attempt to stall or cover up or hide is failing miserably and he’s resorting to outright thuggery, which only works until the pushback overwhelms the thugs. It is a lot easier to perform a coverup when it involves an issue that you can disguise by raising all sorts of hell everywhere else (see: Trump’s insane profiting off of the office with pardons for cash). That’s how Trump’s gotten away with so much to this point.
Now he’s faced with something that automatically focuses everyone’s attention because it has been in our consciousness for years. How did this billionaire Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend/assistant Ghislaine Maxwell manage to get away unscathed for nearly three decades trafficking teenage girls around the world? It’s far more difficult trying to distract from this because it is something that makes even the casual person sit up and think, hmmm, this is fishy. There’s been endless documentaries and lawsuits and conspiracy theories, and these emails demonstrate that, while there necessarily isn’t a “cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles,” there is the elites of this world and they will band together no matter what.
Whether it’s modeling agency owners being besties with Epstein despite having the safety of dozens of teenage girls under contract to them as a responsibility, or university presidents and professors discussing predatory behavior towards female students and/or subordinates, or investment bankers wanting to make the next big stock move with the billionaire, or famously puritanical prosecutors happily and zealously defending a serial sexual abuser, the elites stood together. Money and power, or proximity to power, washes away many sins for the elite. Epstein was simultaneously “best friends” with Trump while also calling him evil; helping Trump get elected, apparently, despite his disgust over certain parts of his agenda, while also advising the Russians how to negotiate policy with Trump. Trump double-crossed Epstein on some investment opportunities as well, yet they still maintained their relationship.
That’s the real rot at the heart of the Epstein scandal—an elite class that believes it can behave with impunity because it has for decades now. From buying politicians to evading justice for criminal acts, these people have turned America into their plaything, like a monarchy of old. Epstein merely followed that model in his own actions. That’s why we need to release all of the files. Let’s have a full accounting of the guilty and wash away the elite influence from the halls of power.